Junk Or Gem? It All Depends On Where You Are

November 26, 1995|By Gary Krino, Orange County Register.

I thought the banged-up, painted little bench was a gem, a true treasure of the hunt. It had a handmade appeal. Old, too, I figured. At least it looked old. A buttery cream paint, chipped and worn and drizzled down its sides and legs in an unplanned pattern that cottage-look types drool over.

The nailheads in its top and sides had rusted a deep burnt orange, which gave the piece that much more cottage style and grace. Beat up and beautiful.

"You want to take that back to California?" Mom exclaimed, eyes rolling, head shaking. "Up here, they use that for kindling."

"Up here," I should explain, is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Cedarville, a delight of a place snuggled into a never-never land of pine-and-cottage-studded islands that has been the family's summer headquarters since the '20s. Not even a stoplight. Other than June, July and August, when cottagers, boaters and fisher-types can create a traffic jam at the only large supermarket within 40 miles, life in Cedarville is not fast enough to merit a red light.

I was in Cedarville to go through the cottage next door to Mom and Dad's. I'd bought it mostly for the lot it stands on. Although it hasn't happened yet, locals say condos are coming, and I wanted the lot as a buffer against possible condo intrusion.

A serious scavenger's hunt

The cottage on the lot had been abandoned for a good dozen years and looked it. A tiny tear-down of a thing with a chemical toilet and a lean-to bedroom that had been knocked off by a falling tree.

Being a serious scavenger (garage sales are my idea of one very good time), I wanted to search that cottage, looking for trinkets and odds and ends before the dozer bulled it over.

That's when I discovered the bench.

I pictured it with a clear glass top, the perfect cottage coffee table. Mom, being charitable, said that if we sanded the bench (God forbid) and painted it a nice brown or something, that it might work. But not in her living room. She was quite happy with the cut-down library table she already had and thank you very much.

I tried to explain that the bench, in its highly weathered, beaten-up form, was valuable. Valuable to whom, Mom wanted to know. She wasn't buying.

Not being one to give up easily, I packed the bench in a box, tied it within an inch of its life with heavy string, and prepared it for the bus-car-plane trip back to California.

When in California ...

A few days after arriving home, I stopped by Sweet William and Wild Goose Chase, a Laguna Beach, Calif., shop that specializes in things cottage. And yup. There they were. Benches just like mine at $165 a pop.

A few days after that, I was paging through one of those trendy shelter mags and found what I swear was my little bench transformed into a coffee table smack in the middle of a totally divine cottage room setting.

I clipped the picture, wrote a note about the $165 price tag and sent it all off to Mom. A few days later she called. She had shown the picture around Cedarville. The consensus seemed to be, "Crazy Californians. Don't they know that's junk?"

I laughed, she laughed, and my bench is in my garage awaiting its glass top. Geography, definition, vision. It might not fly in Michigan, but in California, when that little bench goes coffee table, it's going to be just too hip.